Data is no longer neutral: why is privacy key to protecting people?

In 1948 the UN recognized the right to a private life, laying the global foundations of the right to privacy that still inspires modern data protection laws around the world today.

According to the IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals), by early 2025 82% of people worldwide were protected by some national data privacy law (1). Never before have so many people been covered by rules governing how their personal data is used, shared and protected.

That figure is neither accidental nor sudden. It is the response to a profound transformation: data became the fuel of the digital economy. Today, governments, companies and organizations of every kind base critical decisions on personal data: from access to credit and insurance to health services, employment, education or social benefits. In other words, data is no longer neutral: it shapes our everyday lives directly.

In that context, allowing data to be used without clear responsibilities is no longer an option.

For years, technology moved faster than the law. Massive volumes of data were collected, databases were cross-referenced, decisions were automated and algorithms were trained, often without people really knowing what was happening with their information. The result was a growing sense of lost control, along with leaks, fraud, systemic errors and abusive uses of personal data.

The digital ecosystem has advanced at an unprecedented pace, and with it our right to privacy —the right to decide what information we share and with whom— has become more vulnerable. The risks keep growing: ever more intensive use of data, the ability to spot patterns that are invisible even to humans, hyper-personalization, cyberattacks, the difficulty of enforcement and, more recently, the massive arrival of generative artificial intelligence, trained on enormous volumes of data, which only makes protecting our private life harder.

Faced with this, countries on every continent started to react. Stricter privacy laws were passed, modeled on standards such as the European GDPR, recognizing something fundamental: protecting personal data is not just protecting information, it is protecting people. Their dignity, their privacy and, at the same time, building trust between people and organizations.

Case in point: in Chile, Law 19.628 on the Protection of Private Life has been in place since 1999, but it was born in an era without the challenges of social media, big data or artificial intelligence. And while 2018 brought a historic step, with constitutional recognition of the right to the protection of privacy and personal data, it is only with Law 21.719, which takes effect in December 2026, that Chile will really catch up with international standards. The updated legal framework sets out to answer this new reality through:

Stronger rights for data subjects

Real accountability demanded of organizations

Effective penalties and an enforcement authority

Recognition of a globalized world, requiring adequate standards when data leaves the country

All of it with a simple but far-reaching goal: that our data is never used at the expense of our rights.

(1) Source: iapp.org